•  300
    Virtue epistemology and moral luck
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 3 (2): 179--192. 2006.
    Thomas Nagel has proposed that the existence of moral luck mandates a general attitude of skepticism in ethics. One popular way of arguing against Nagel’s claim is to insist that the phenomenon of moral luck itself is an illusion , in the sense that situations in which it seems to occur may be plausibly re-described so as to show that agents need not be held responsible for the unlucky outcomes of their actions. Here I argue that this strategy for explaining away moral luck fails because it does…Read more
  •  288
    Against Brain-in-a-Vatism: On the Value of Virtual Reality
    Philosophy and Technology 27 (4): 561-579. 2014.
    The term “virtual reality” was first coined by Antonin Artaud to describe a value-adding characteristic of certain types of theatrical performances. The expression has more recently come to refer to a broad range of incipient digital technologies that many current philosophers regard as a serious threat to human autonomy and well-being. Their concerns, which are formulated most succinctly in “brain in a vat”-type thought experiments and in Robert Nozick's famous “experience machine” argument, re…Read more
  •  145
    Psychological Trauma and the Simulated Self
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 44 (3): 349-364. 2014.
    In the 1980s, there was a significant upsurge in diagnoses of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Ian Hacking suggests that the roots of this tendency lie in the excessive willingness of psychologists past and present to engage in the “psychologization of trauma.” I argue that Hacking makes some philosophically problematic assumptions about the putative threat to human autonomy that is posed by the increasing availability, attractiveness, and plausibility of various forms of simulated experience. I …Read more
  •  123
    We build on some of Daniel Dennett’s ideas about predictive indispensability to characterize properties of video games discernable by people as computationally emergent if, and only if: (1) they can be instantiated by a computing machine, and (2) there is no algorithm for detecting instantiations of them. We then use this conception of emergence to provide support to the aesthetic ideas of Stanley Fish and to illuminate some aspects of the Chomskyan program in cognitive science
  •  90
    The Transition into Virtual Reality
    Disputatio 11 (55): 437-451. 2019.
    In “The Virtual and the Real,” David Chalmers argues that there is an epistemic and ontological parity between VR and ordinary reality. My argument here is that, whatever the plausibility of these claims, they provide no basis for supposing that there is a similar parity of value. Careful reflection upon certain aspects of the transition that individuals make from interacting with real-world, physical environments to interacting with VR provides a basis for thinking that, to the extent that ther…Read more
  •  85
    Mind and anomalous monism
    Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2005.
    Anomalous Monism is a type of property dualism in the philosophy of mind. Property dualism combines the thesis that mental phenomena are strictly irreducible to physical phenomena with the denial that mind and body are discrete substances. For the anomalous monist, the plausibility of property dualism derives from the fact that although mental states, events and processes have genuine causal powers, the causal relationships that they enter into with physical entities cannot be explained by appea…Read more
  •  76
    The Subject of Experience (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 68 (273): 870-873. 2018.
    The Subject of Experience. By Galen Strawson.
  •  74
    Computability theory and literary competence
    British Journal of Aesthetics 46 (4): 369-386. 2006.
    criticism defend the idea that an individual reader's understanding of a text can be a factor in determining the meaning of what is written in that text, and hence must play a part in determining the very identity conditions of works of literary art. We examine some accounts that have been given of the type of readerly ‘competence’ that a reader must have in order for her responses to a text to play this sort of constitutive role. We argue that the analogy drawn by Stanley Fish and Jonathan Cull…Read more
  •  67
    On the Value of Make-Believe
    Journal of Aesthetic Education 46 (4): 20-31. 2012.
    Around the middle of the twentieth century, psychologists rediscovered the value of make-believe. Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, there was a sudden and considerable outpouring of books that explored the pedagogical and therapeutic significance of imaginative play. Numerous experimental studies published since then have emphasized the importance of games of make-believe in the cognitive development and successful socialization of the very young.1 And increased attention to the use of mental im…Read more
  •  63
    On the Conceivability of an Omniscient Interpreter
    Dialogue 46 (4): 627-636. 2007.
    I examine the “omniscient interpreter” (OI) argument against scepticism that Donald Davidson published in 1977 only to retract it twenty-two years later. I argue that the argument's persuasiveness has been underestimated. I defend it against the charges that Davidson assumes the actual existence of an OI and that Davidson's other philosophical commitments are incompatible with the very conceivability of an OI. The argument's surface implausibility derives from Davidson's suggestion that an OI wo…Read more
  •  55
    The virtuous parent
    Journal of Value Inquiry 44 (4): 499-508. 2010.
  •  54
    The Problem With (Quasi-Realist) Expressivism
    Southwest Philosophy Review 28 (1): 33-41. 2012.
  •  36
    Experience Machines: The Philosophy of Virtual Worlds (edited book)
    Rowman & Littlefield. 2017.
    In his classic work Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick asked his readers to imagine being permanently plugged into a 'machine that would give you any experience you desired'. The authors in this volume re-evaluate the merits of Nozick’s argument, and use it to examine subsequent developments in culture and technology.
  •  34
    Homo Ludens Revisited
    Southwest Philosophy Review 33 (1): 1-14. 2017.
  •  30
    The Cry of Nature
    Southwest Philosophy Review 27 (1): 215-223. 2011.
  •  28
    Reply to Rosebury
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 6 (2): 245-248. 2009.
    In his paper 'Moral Responsibility and Moral Luck,' Brian Rosebury argues that believers in moral luck ignore the fact that an agent's moral responsibilities often encompass certain epistemic obligations not usually recognized by commonsense morality. I have suggested in my article 'Virtue Epistemology and Moral Luck' that the plausibility of Rosebury's position depends upon a philosophically dubious account of the relation between first- and third-person perspectives on ethically significant ev…Read more
  •  24
    Response to “Moral Heroism and the Requirement Claim” by Kyle Fruh
    Southwest Philosophy Review 30 (2): 13-16. 2014.
  •  18
    "Thick" Aesthetic Emotions and the Autonomy of Art
    Philosophy and Literature 40 (2): 415-430. 2016.
    For the properly “cultivated,” proclaimed Oscar Wilde in 1890, “beautiful things mean only Beauty.”1 The idea that artworks possess a discrete and autonomous type of value, by virtue of their capacity to provoke a distinctively aesthetic type of response, is most often associated with artists and critics belonging to the modernist tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Certainly, many influential writers of the period who expressed more instrumentalist attitudes toward t…Read more
  •  10
    Stone Soup: Distributional Goods and Principles of Justice
    Social Theory and Practice 46 (4): 869-889. 2020.
    Certain sorts of disputes about principles of distributive justice that have occupied a great deal of attention in recent political philosophy turn out to be fundamentally unresolvable, when they are conducted in ignorance of whether an important subclass of basic social goods exists within any particular society. I employ the folktale ‘Stone Soup’ to illustrate how such distributional goods might come into existence. Using the debate about John Rawls’s Difference Principle as an example, I argu…Read more
  •  9
    Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: Raiding the Temple of Wisdom (edited book)
    Open Court Publishing. 2012.
    Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy presents twenty-one chapters by different writers, all D&D aficionados but with starkly different insights and points of view. The book is divided into three parts. The first, "Heroic Tier: The Ethical Dungeon-Crawler," explores what D&D has to teach us about ethics. Part II, "Paragon Tier: Planes of Existence," arouses a new sense of wonder about both the real world and the collaborative world game players create. The third part, "Epic Tier: Leveling Up," is …Read more
  •  9
    Philosophers from Plato and Augustine to Heidegger, Nozick, and Baudrillard have warned us of the dangers of living on too heavy a diet of illusion and make-believe. But contemporary cultural life provides broader, more attractive opportunities to do so than have existed at any other point in history. The gentle forms of self-deceit that such experiences require of us, and that so many have regarded as ethically unwholesome or psychologically self-destructive, can in fact serve as vital means to…Read more
  •  6
    “News! Oh! Yes, I always like news.” Throughout Emma, Jane Austen’s eponymous heroine repeatedly betrays her intense love of gossip. Other characters (notably, Miss Bates and Mr. Knightley) also indulge and rejoice in this style of conversation, as does the novel’s own narrator. In this chapter, the authors propose to examine the multifaceted and ambiguous role played by gossip in Emma, in light of the diverse opinions expressed by a number of critics and philosophers about the ethical and psych…Read more
  •  5
  •  5
    Distributive Justice and Gameplay
    Philosophia 51 (4): 2103-2115. 2023.
    In Anarchy, State and Utopia Robert Nozick criticizes a broad range of theories of distributive justice using a thought experiment that involves the financial incentives for playing basketball. In this paper, I defend the so-called “patterning” conceptions of justice that are the targets of Nozick’s “Wilt Chamberlain” argument, via the development of an extended analogy between the distribution of politically relevant resources and the playing of games, as this latter activity is characterized b…Read more
  •  4
    How can _Wii Sports_ teach us about metaphysics? Can playing _World of Warcraft_ lead to greater self-consciousness? How can we learn about aesthetics, ethics and divine attributes from _Zork_, _Grand Theft Auto_, and _Civilization_? A variety of increasingly sophisticated video games are rapidly overtaking books, films, and television as America's most popular form of media entertainment. It is estimated that by 2011 over 30 percent of US households will own a Wii console - about the same perce…Read more
  •  4
    Review of Rule-Following and Realism, by Gary Ebbs (review)
    Essays in Philosophy 5 (1): 248-252. 2004.